youtube-viewer – alternative way to interact with YouTube

There are tons of really useful command-line multimedia utilities available for Linux (and other platforms). cmus, youtube-dl, castero are to name just three essential command-line multimedia apps that frequent my shell.

If you’re looking for another way to watch YouTube videos, you should also check out youtube-viewer. It’s billed as a semi-automatic tool for browsing YouTube. It has lots of advanced options, including search-based filtering on various criteria and support for selecting videos matched by a regular expression.

The software offers both a command-line interface to YouTube as well as a graphical interface. The software is written in the Perl programming language. For GTK YouTube Viewer my system was missing File::ShareDir. Installing the perl-file-share package fixed the problem.

Let’s see an image of the command-line interface as well as the graphical user interface in action.

youtube-viewer

GTK YouTube Viewer

Features of the software:

Search, play and download YouTube videos. Downloading videos is useful particularly if have a poor internet connection and don’t have the bandwidth to stream videos.

Search results show video information: video length, number of views, upvotes/downvotes, uploader, video category and upload date. Both the command-line and graphical interfaces retrieve the full description of each video.

View video comments, add a comment, rate a video, add it to favorites from the software.

Auto-generated captions.

Access your YouTube account and view your subscriptions, favorites, recommended videos and watch history. Support for subscribing to a channel. Subscription videos can be sorted by published time.

Advanced YouTube search: search for videos, channels or playlists, sort search results by relevance, rating, view count or date published as well as upload date (all time, this month, this week or today), search by video duration etc, with configurable results per page.

List the latest videos uploaded or favorited by a user, list playlists created by a user or subscription videos for a username.

Browse YouTube videos by categories or tops (top rated, top favorites, most shared, most popular, etc.).

Supports entering a YouTube video URL in the search field to play that video.

Videos that do not include a video ID are filtered out from the results.

About The Author

Steve Emms is the main author of OSSBlog.org. This site aims to promote open source software and hardware. Steve has written thousands of articles about open source software. He is also the creator of LinuxLinks.com.